


Ophiuchus

by brittlelimbs



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Abortion, Angst, Body Horror, Dark fic, Drug-Induced Sex, Dubious Consent, F/M, M/M, Marathon Sex, Pining, Pregnancy, Rough Sex, Self Harm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-12
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-19 23:52:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,551
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5985301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brittlelimbs/pseuds/brittlelimbs
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Snoke wants Rey bred.<br/>Hux, naturally, is chosen to oversee the whole ludicrous process.<br/>(Kylo and Rey are drugged into sex for the sake of the Order, Hux POV, then Rey POV)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hux

**Author's Note:**

> A little context: Hux has been assigned to make sure things are running smoothly on Ren's end, essentially. Keep him running until Snoke's plan is executed.
> 
> ((Ophiuchus is the snake-bearer constellation))

At the first examination, Hux finds Ren naked, panting on the hard, metal table. Ren's legs are spread wide to accommodate the pink, raw chafe of his cock between them, resting on a silky thatch of dark curls.

Three hours. He'd fucked Rey for three goddamn hours, _straight_ , and everything about this whole insane scheme is fucking _obscene_.

Ren cracks open one glassy eye, regards him lazily. Bastard.

“Hux.” His voice is wrecked, naturally, and as sluggish as a humid summer. He’s still high as shit, then.

“Re--Ren.” Hux’s voice is punctuated by a dry, pitiful swallow, and he curses. Fuck him. Kylo Ren is no longer man, he’s—predator, dark and huge and positively _dripping_ with musk-heavy pheromones that make Hux sweat beneath his tight, regulation collar. This is not this simpering man-child he knows so well, oh, no. The drugs, if anything, are thorough.

He’ll give Snoke that.

He does not dally; he orders the nurse to insert an IV in Ren’s pale forearm, then spins on his heel and leaves, hands clasped tightly behind his back.

When he returns to his quarters, he spends twenty minutes in the fresher—an exorbitant amount of time—trying to scrub the stink of sex from his scalp and skin. From the looks he receives over morning mess, he is only partially successful.

 

 

On the second visit, a few hours later, Ren is no less naked. The bruises, though—those are new. He’s dappled, stained, by nebulas of broken blood vessels, and their angry reds and purples are so dark against his milky skin it’s lewd to look at. Hux smoothly enters the chamber, folds himself into the plastic visitor’s chair beside the table (how quaint). He isn’t surprised at this development; the girl didn't seem to be the sort of delicate flower that would fold to Ren, roll over on her belly, let him fuck her from behind.

He ignores Ren’s dark eyes on him as he tracks the course of his contusions, neck and wrist and thigh, _strike_ and _strike_ and _strike_. Desert viper, rippled musculature, coiling up and through Ren’s fist as he clutches at her. The dry hiss of scales on skin. _No_ , Hux thinks, _she gives as good as she gets_. It’s something a little like grudging respect.  

Groaning, Ren folds an arm over his eyes, regards Hux from underneath with two slits, glittering in the shadow.

“Go away.” He says finally, turning away, curled to the wall like a petulant child. A fat hickey rears its plummy head, tucked at the nape of his neck, and Hux can’t help his little flinch at the livid score-marks he’s got dragged across his back, shoulder to lumbar. These battlescars are hideously decadent, but some small part Hux has to admit, he’s relived. This is the Ren he knows how to manage: cranky, bratty, probably dehydrated from an afternoon spent fucking his brains out, squirming feverishly in a drugged haze. Spilling in the girl again, and again, and again. Disgusting.

“Believe me, if I could leave you here—“

“Oh, shut _up_ , Hux.” His name rings off the plastisteel of the wall. “You’re just in a tizzy ‘cause you haven’t stuck your dick in anything warm since graduation.”

Hux pauses, almost wants to mention the quick fuck he had with his lieutenant a few months back. Then again, it would be petty. Also: Ren doesn’t need to know.

“Next time Snoke uses my prick for breeding stock, I’ll be sure to tell you,” he says simply, rising to get the nurse.

Their patient is looking a little peaked; he needs another dose.

 

The third visit is a nightmare. Ren’s far, far too gone, tongue working against the fat wetness of his lower lip as he comes on to Hux, all lidded eyes and panting breath, scrabbling at the buttons of Hux’s greatcoat.

“I want. I want—“ His voice is a lazy, whisky- gravel drawl, crossfaded on lust and the drug, knows nothing more than homing signal of _heat_ and _flesh_ and _want_. Huge, calloused hands, reeking of sex, parsing through the woolen layers Hux’s uniform as if searching for some precious item. The other one pins his wrists against the desk’s sharp edge, like the Force-hold Ren’s wrapped him up in isn’t quite enough. Ren’s body heat is a heavy, intoxicated blanket, and Hux feels himself filling, hot and stiff, against his thigh.

He’s a fucking maniac. He’s gone completely mad.

Security is called. Hux is lucky that they come when they do, though he’s _thoroughly_ mortified by the scene they find when they burst in. He supposes he’s lucky that Ren is physically unable to do much more than rut his nakedness against Hux’s clothed leg, growl in frustration at his own flaccid cock. Only a nightmare, Hux thinks as they pull the great, heaving beast away, when it could’ve been a catastrophe.

His hands are trembling. _Damage control, yes, that’s it._

_Damage control._

 

From visits four through six, Ren doesn’t talk to Hux at all. Maybe it’s his weird, private way of saying _sorry_ , or a new method of wallowing in the guilt, punching the wound in his side, drawing strength from the blood. Typical. Or, maybe (most likely), his silence is nothing more complex than pure exhaustion; it’s been two days of IVs, of caffeine drips, of bacta on all the red-raw, pleasure-blistered parts of him. He fucks her till he’s utterly spent, shleps home to Hux in sweaty pieces, then is rebuilt again. No quarter given; the simple cycle repeats, Hux certifying over and over that Ren is whole, able to come, to impregnate the viper with the messiah of their cause. Or something like that.

Hux tells himself that he’s past caring at this point. It’s all fucking ludicrous. He deals in human chattel, too, he’ll admit it— he breeds troopers, Snoke breeds Force-freaks, and if the old man says he needs someone to help point and shoot for his prized stud? Well, he’s in no position to get uppity. Even if Kylo Ren is the one he’s giving a reach-around to.

But everything is so _damned_ disrupted; he’s woken in the middle of the night, several times, to go and tend to the animal, lick his wounds for him. He almost trips over his own feet on the way back from visit five, stumbling back to his quarters at a terribly surly hour, diving into bed with a zeal he hasn’t shown since his academy days. Vaguely, against the soft cotton of his pillows, he wonders if this is what parenthood his like.

Hux thinks of the viper, too. How she’s faring.  

He slips into sleep, hoping, for her sake, that it’s well.

 

“You continue to impress me, Ren. I didn’t know that it was possible to be both impotent _and_ utterly incompetent.”

He’s watching the lackadaisical, sated heap splayed out before him, hands folded neatly in his lap. Ren’s gently playing with the braid of fluids planted in his brachial, stroking across the plastic tubes like some insipid musician on his instrument. Like a child. A giant, drugged-up, oversexed child.

Two days and still nothing. The little part of Hux that’s adopted this weird, surrogate role, his tertiary husband status, is worried; he never thought that conceiving would take this long. Maybe Ren really _does_ shoot blanks, or the girl’s womb is truly as barren as they place they took her from. He wouldn’t be surprised, but the irony of it makes Hux want to laugh. Snoke’s faithful dog, mind and soul and _cock_ , his balls all but literally cupped in those dry, age-white hands, unable to deliver the one thing his master ever wanted.

Hux watches Ren’s listless, drug-addled gaze as it traces the texture of the ceiling above them. Pitiful, hollowed by artificial lust, stinking of two-day old sweat and cunt, thick, dark hair gleaming; it needs to be washed. How repulsive. _Coming. That’s all you’re good for._ The thought is loud, vicious, projected with all the venom Hux’s Force-mute mind can muster. He hopes that Ren can hear it.

The man simply rolls over; new bruises there, overlapping with the old ones like craters of an ancient moon, accumulated over years of constant pummeling. An asteroid belt, broken across the plane of his pale back.

Finally, sick of the silent treatment, Hux goes to the command center. He smooths his hair as he walks through the corridors, straightens his hat. Yes. He is Hux, and he’s determined to design and execute a million brilliant plans to usurp the galaxy, to architect the trajectory of the stars into a structure of his making.

When he finally reaches the observation deck, his steps slow, then stop at its edge. Above him, through the huge glassed dome of the center, is the blackness of night; He hadn’t realized so much time had passed.

Suddenly, he’s untethered where he stands, lifted into those cold and cloudy stars by a force he cannot name.

A presence behind him. _What—_

He turns, and runs right into the crisp, gray uniform of an officer. She salutes him.

“General.”

 _I—_ His jaw works emptily for a moment, probably looking like galaxy’s most overdressed carp, before shutting it again, firmly. He simply nods, and she is dismissed.

He whirls back to the viewport. The black leather of his gloves creaks, tight in the clench of his grip around the guardrail, squeezing the cold metal in his fist while he watches the galaxy, tempered through Starkiller’s atmosphere. For a moment, he’d entirely forgotten what he was doing.

He scans the heavens hard. There, somewhere between this galaxy’s spiral arms, is the bitter truth of it: his mind is still many floors below, down and down, beneath durasteel beams and the busywork a thousand little ancillary lives.

Tangled in that obsidian hair.

 

 

On the ninth visit, Ren is solidly asleep. Hux brusquely walks inside the infirmary, glancing at Ren’s vitals, making sure Snoke’s purebred is still alive and kicking. He is. That’s disappointing.

But wait—Hux pauses his diagnostics. This body he’s become so sickeningly familiar with, something about it is strange; Ren’s curled in the oddest way at the edge of the table. It takes Hux a moment to pinpoint exactly what it is. Then he puts his finger on it: a couple. How a couple sleeps.

For the first time in this whole hellish ordeal, Ren is laying as if he’s beside another, a phantom body against his, spooned on the stainless steel of the examination table.

Hux can see it, _god damn him_ , in the way Ren’s crooked an arm under his head to support another one beside it, the posture of his curved back: A process old as time, as textbook to humanity as the framework of their DNA. Ren’s starting to carve out a little space inside himself for the girl.

For just a moment, he imagines himself as he pops open her jaw, presses the flat diamond of her head against a glass with his thumbs, squeezes the venom from her fangs. Milks them until there’s none left to coagulate in Ren’s blood, until he’s crushed her hissing head beneath his hands.

But he already knew she was poisonous, didn’t he.

Hux feels his mouth warp. He makes to leave quickly, even though he still has so many asinine little tasks to do, tests to run, diagnostics of lymph and piss and blood to micromanage so that the Supreme Leader won’t destroy him, or worse—demote him.

Hux wonders if the girl’s in love. Ren’s fucked her in the cunt, _god knows_ he has, but Hux has never considered the idea that he might’ve fucked her in the head, too. He puts down his datapad, stands, and leaves, the sharp clip of his boots echoing in the corridor.

Ren never was the kind of masochist so simply _throw_ himself on the sword, Hux thinks, following his feet towards his quarters. No, he has to twist it, too.

Then— _Waxing poetic about him now? Hux, you pathetic fuck._

 

There is no tenth visit. Hux is simply called on his comm, told by the nurse that his presence is required.

 

Ren is seated when Hux had arrives (certainly not of breath from running _at all_ ), legs swung over the side of the table, body tented over itself, elbows on knees. Hux can read the smugness in him, just through the squared hold of his bare shoulders. Success, then. Drinks on him tonight, or whatever senseless custom accompanies this kind of thing. A strained laugh dies somewhere in this throat.

“So?” he says, like he doesn’t already fucking know precisely what has happened.

Ren leans back, pushing his hips out as he slides off the table, and _oh_ —all at once, it’s crushingly awkward, shameful, to see the nakedness of Kylo Ren, a gutting feeling after three days of near-indifference.

Hux realizes something: despite having kept intimate tabs on Ren’s naked body over the course of the past three days, tracing the fine lines in his skin, studying his resting heart rate, Hux has never seen him, well--fully hard, he supposes. He’s always walked in to find Ren in his refraction period, a state of low-level, exhausted arousal, the flushed afterglow of a sickeningly long marathon of serial orgasms. Of all the facets of Ren Hux ever considered himself becoming intimate with, this strange limbo state was not one of them.

Now, Ren’s still wet with the slick of her, gleaming a strained flush-pink in the strip lighting. Hux has a sudden vision of dark hands, grabbing, taking, pulling the girl free of him mid-stroke, sliding her off his cock, leaving them lonely, both throbbing and thirsty for completion. He assumes she’s in a room like this one, somewhere on another level, undergoing tests to confirm what Ren already knows to be true.

“She is with child,” Ren says, still lingering on the edge of table. “I felt it.”

His face is straight, but the bastard is preening, canting his slender hips just so—some toxic slurry of the drug and Ren’s natural pride has just made him so damn _slutty_ , and it makes Hux’s blood boil.

He manages a nod instead. “Snoke, does he know?”

“Yes, of course,” Ren snaps, “I told him the moment I knew.”

“Right.” A pause. “Well. Congratulations, or.” _Hux, you fucking idiot._ “I suppose my work here is done.” He turns, making for a quick and cowardly exit.

The open door before him slides closed with a hiss.

“Where is she.” Ren’s voice is even, but here’s a genuine, raw note of confusion underneath.

And that’s the problem right there, isn’t it.

Hux closes his eyes, still facing towards the door. One inhale, one exhale.

_You knew it. You knew it when Snoke didn't, because you’re smart, and because you’re a human being and you know how human beings work._

Breath in. _You knew_. Breath out. The smell of antiseptic, the harsh tang of metallic medical clutter. The smell of _him_ , heady, concentrated, nearly fermented in its strength—Hux is choking on it.

“Where is she,” Ren repeats, closer now.

Hux wets his lips and resolutely doesn’t turn around. “How should I know?”

“Hux.”

“I was only ever given one patient to nurse. I know nothing of the girl. ”

Ren barks. Hux realizes it’s a laugh.

“Coward. You tell me.” He can feel Ren’s body heat again, radiating against his back.

In a surprisingly daring move, Hux turns to meet him. There’s a brief readjustment period; he had forgotten quite how tall Ren is at his full height, can’t say he’s ever been close enough to warrant a slight head tilt _up_ to meet his eyes before. Has the man always been this infuriatingly massive?

“Even if I knew, do you think I’d tell you?” Hux’s voice is calm, condescending. He tucks his trembling hands behind his back, stares unflinchingly into those dark eyes. “Snoke wanted your cock, and assigned me as your handler. Things are much more simple than you’re making them to be, Ren.”

The jarring clatter of spilled instruments, shattering glass. Before he can think, the back of Hux’s head hits the wall so hard it that, for a dizzy moment, he sees stars. There are two feverish hands fisted in his coat, lifting him, pinning him, letting only the tips of his boots scrabble across the ground.

Through the pins and needles in his vision, Hux nearly rolls his eyes. _So predictable._

Hux blinks down at Ren, trying to convey disinterest to the best of his ability, less than surprised at the drama. Though Hux can feel the strain across his chest and arms flooding his face with flush, he raises his chin, looking down his nose to watch Ren quiver. The sight is ridiculously gratifying, and _damn him_ , but the urge to further twist that stupid, gorgeous, open face flares from a simmer to a boil in Hux’s belly:

_Infant._

He spits the thought into Ren’s mind. He’s successful; in all those years of tantrums, he has never seen Ren so angry as this, so absolutely shaking with rage. Good.

And then suddenly there’s a wetness pooled at the corners of those eyes and _what_ —Hux somehow manages a double take. Kylo Ren, dark lord, _father_ , is _crying_ through his gritted jaw. His nostrils flare as he takes in a deep, shuddering breath, lip curling back in a way that is nothing more than pure, animal fury.

“You heartless fucking _bastard._ You could never, ever, know what this is.” Ren’s arms are beginning to tremble from the strain of Hux’s bulk, but they hold fast. “What she means to me. What _they_ mean.”

 _They_. The tiniest seed of Ren, already quickening inside her. The girl, months from now, gently rocking herself as she cups her stomach. Home is lightyears away. She is alone.

“A splendid bride she’d m—make for you.” Hux’s voice is squeezed from his throat, the sound of it raspy with strain.

Ren screams, and the sound is feral.

Suddenly, a hand, huge, invasive, is scouring the most private workings of Hux’s mind. It’s violation of the intimate intimate sort, and Hux can neither speak nor think nor feel around it, all encompassing, terrible. All of the carefully crafted composure built up over years in uniform is cracked open like bone, and Ren is feasting on the marrow inside. His mind couldn’t have been more exposed if his brains were leaking from his ears.

And there they go, those little shameful things, dripping on the ground between them.

His fears, his insecurities. His father’s arthritic hands. A thousand meals, eaten alone. All the shit he’s tried so hard to bury, uprooted, clenched in Ren’s victorious fists.

Oh, and there, torn from the very base of his skull as he’s ransacked for the very last of himself: that sweet thing, that soft and new thing.

_Tangled in that obsidian hair._

_Ah, well._ Hux may have lost, but he takes comfort in the fact that even in that, he’s proven Ren wrong in something; he does, in fact have a heart. And it hurts, god damn it all, for this beast before him. 

 

The infirmary’s lights are flickering. Hux is only vaguely aware of the carnage around him, the shards of glass beneath his cheek and palms. His mouth is hot, coppery.

Ren’s looking down at him like a spooked animal, pink-splotchy chest heaving, erection still twitching, red and angry, against his belly. There are curls plastered to his sweaty forehead. He seems to have grown even harder, somehow—Hux doesn’t know how that’s even possible.

Hux laughs, a little broken sounding thing. The man above him looks, for once in his life, like the enigma he’s always pined to be, who he wears his mask to emulate. Ren’s child-face, his openness, is gone; in this moment, Hux honestly doesn’t know if he’s going to beat him, or fuck him, or crush his head between his hands—he thinks of her snake-head, the utterly satisfying crunch of her skull. Her slick, her poison.

Hux wets his lips again, gently shakes against the floor, and feels the dark heat of that indomitable gaze.

For once in his life, he has absolutely nothing to say.


	2. Rey I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rey's POV of their first day together (the first few of Hux's visits-- this is the other side)

Rey remembers the first day, but only tangentially. A fever-dream, or a story someone told her once, fits and flashes smeared across her consciousness. Strangeness, newness.

She remembers, vaguely, how it starts. She’s never felt like this before, and the feeling is all she knows; _thirst_ is the only language that could compare, but it’s throughout the sweaty flesh of her, pumping erratically in her circulatory system. Like she’s unwound her coarse wrappings, soaked herself so thoroughly in the sun that she’s radiating a sizzling heat of her own. Like water would hiss, evaporate if it touched her skin.

But this isn’t Jakku.

A bed. She’s on a bed, but there are no blankets, no sheets. This is her world, now, a linen island shored up by dim and drowsy light. A droid stands sentry in the corner, blinking softly, though Rey isn’t disturbed by its presence. A man— this part is like a dream, too, her captor’s face on a different body, one vulnerable and naked—kneels before her, between her legs. She finds, lazily combing through the nebulous mist of her mind, through his lush hair, that she isn’t particularly disturbed by him, either.

He’s whispering something down there, humid huff and push of consonants brushing gently against the place between her legs, and _oh_ —even just that, the faintest whisper of touches, is so, so overwhelmingly much.

He’s saying something about _importance_ , nobility and duty, strange and structured notions that seem, somehow, too grave for this moment. She catches the word _messiah_ slipping from his tongue like sand as he lifts one hand, rubs it gently across the lowest part of her belly, his skin pale on her flat goldenness.

 _Here_ , he seems to say in careful, broad strokes across her empty womb. _Here, we will find the beginning and the end of all things_.

When, at long last, his soft lips chase the words to where he’s gently laid them, up against the swollen slick of her, it’s as if he’s asking for a kind of benediction.

For once in her life, some part of Rey is sacred.

 

It isn’t easy, being holy. Rey discovers this around the stinging strain of taking him into herself for the first time, encompassing his body within her own. Not unpleasant, just—difficult, even though every coaxed inch somehow makes the wetness rise further between her legs, a strange and wonderful spring, aching for discovery. She explores it when he finally pauses for a moment, all panting breath salt-shine, caressing the fluttering seam between them her calloused fingertips. He gasps brokenly as she rubs across it, testing the breadth of their joining. _Incredible!_ Her hazed mind is boggled; she yields so perfectly. It’s a new type of muscle-memory, and she find it as deeply satisfying as the work running or fighting or knowing the precise and intimate workings of a machine. She’s blood-hot, humming and primed, and the confidence she has in her body is total, as it as always been. It takes only a hike in her hips to take him to the hilt.

Everything aligns.

Mind to mind, he opens to her, and it’s the brilliance of dawn. She wasn’t fully alive before this moment, _no_ —she’s reveling in her sixth sense, this closeness, this knowingness. Their pleasure is doubled and refracted between them, building so quickly that Rey’s left breathless, and they’re trembling together in each other’s arms, in awe of themselves.

Rey giddily wonders if they are as close as it is possible for two people to be. _No!_ Her drugged mind screams, echoing between them in the claustrophobic space between their heartbeats. _Closer, closer!_

And so, at the height of this dizzying axis, he moves. They both gasp; it’s _exquisite_. Mind and body, layer on layer, a thousand different pieces moving together, perfectly. He’s only allowed a few hurried thrusts before they’re coming, one of his hands vice-tight around her forearm, her fingers knotted into the back of his head. Simple.

Her legs are shaking where they’re crossed over his lower back, hooked at the ankles, and he parts them gently as he pulls away. He looks wrecked; his eyes are half-lidded, flush high and bright across his cheekbones. His gaze skates across her own, as if suddenly ashamed, before he bows his head to check between her legs. Curious, she follows him; through their combined effort, they’ve thoroughly soaked the fitted sheet, and probably the mattress beneath. Who knew a desert girl could have such an oasis hidden all up inside of her? The idea is suddenly ridiculous, and she gives a little, breathy laugh.

She watches over the swell of her still-heaving breasts as he reaches down with two long pale fingers, moves around her lips and folds with gentle passes, collecting up his seed. He holds his findings up between them, letting the stickiness of his fingers glimmer in the low light. The sight is so decadent, she stirs again. Then, in a strange and curious movement, he leans over, just for a moment, and mutters something over the wetness they’ve made. It’s a little mumbled prayer, and the meaning of it slips from her lax grasp, but then he’s pushing his breath-blessed fingers back inside her, and she couldn’t care in the slightest.

With a wisp of a thought, she’s caught his gaze, drawn him up from the reverie of his ritual; she’s ready again, to attempt that insurmountable peak.

And so they do.

This, perhaps, is where she lost herself on that first day, too deeply awash with pleasure to come up from its warm and darkened depths for air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> haha what is this shit i'm getting in too deep  
> also sorry for all the confusion in the previous chapter !


	3. Rey II

On the second day, Rey discovers that the world has texture _._ It’s made of velvety, rumpled stuff, a material that affords traction, a ruffed pelt to grip tight so that she might not lose it. That she might make memories. Those don’t slip-slide away, now, letting any concept of space or time winnow to nothing between the dark strands of his hair, the silky space between their bellies, taking her mind with them.

On the second day, Rey finds herself suddenly, jarringly, elbow-deep in the tactile nature of reality, and she realizes that she’s being taken. There’re hands hooked under her armpits, around her waist, and they’re too cold to be the right ones—not the slender, astute things that have learned how to work her just right, warmed to the heat of her body so precisely that she’s not sure where they end and she begins. A part of her, an extension of their hive-mind. They’re the wrong hands, ice around her wrists, and _this is happening, this is happing right now—_

She mewls, outright, and laces her fingers behind his neck, uncaring as she yanks at the hairs at his nape; this is Not Right. Ren is yelling at them, whoever’s come from the place outside their island, and she harbors herself against the vibrations of his chest. She hooks her chin over his shoulder, and sees, for the first time, that there are bruises on the planes of him, _dozens_ of them, and she’s not sure where they came from. As she tucks her knees on either side his hips, shins pressed into the deep well on the bed created by his bodyweight, the place between her spread legs brushes against the softness of him and _oh_ —she didn’t know she could _be_ this sore. She gasps with the caustic sting of it. He runs a hand across her hip, as if in apology.

Rey rakes her fingers though the lush fur of her half-lucid mind, combing with diffuse frustration for those lust-drowned memories. _When had this happened?_ When were they not divine, made perfect and unbreakable, above the unreliability of human flesh?

 

Pulling them apart is like pulling apart two halves of an overripe fruit, something wet and pink and glisten-sticky, but the hands are successful; Rey finds herself alone. The room is so cold, white and unerringly bright, compared to their island. Their little den. She feels homesick for it, and presses out to Ren, finds him, holds his heartbeat close for comfort. The satiation of him, that flushed warmth and solidness, gives a relaxing anchor-weight to her bones. He’s nearby. He’s safe. They will be returned to each other in due time.

The nurse makes her relieve herself in a cup, absurdly, trembling on uncertain legs. It’s like pissing fire. Then, while Rey’s thoroughly sulking, the old woman hikes her onto the examination table and puts her feet in two stirrups, one foot, and then the other, spreading her legs wide. Rey shivers at the feeling of metal against her tender arches, how much this resembles when he’d carefully opened her to him, peeling down to her white-hot core with an excruciating gentleness. Light hands, brushing the golden, downy hairs on her thighs, _just so_. But this is different; the nurse’s warm hands are soft, but fastidious, peering down between her legs, studying intently. Her face is flat, expressionless, though not unkind. Rey hisses when a gloved finger touches her, slips between her burning folds, and then—relief. Night-cool sand on sunburned skin, so sweet and soothing that Rey could cry (she does, but just a little). A salve of some kind, just for her. She feels so special.

Rey is pored over, studied in a million different ways; her blood is drawn, temperature taken, heartbeats measured and accounted for. She sleeps and fits and starts throughout it all, waking to another nurse, a prickling in her inner wrist; she’s come to fill her with pale fluids piped through plastic tubes, direct to her veins, nourishing her.

Rey’s body is an artifact, now, but more than every other part of her combined, her cunt is a source of absolute fascination the two of them. She can’t help but laugh a little; this private part of her, a normal and pedantic piece, is now a mecca, a holy place from which the sun rises and sets. They prod and pry, exploring it, trying to massage out threads of knotted information.

Finally, after some indiscernibly hazy amount of time has passed, one of the nurses declares:

“Negative, again.”

All of her, encompassed in two simple words. _Well._ Rey’s head is swimming. No messiah here, she supposes; where will she go now, what is she to do. Where is Ren.

Then one of the nurses has a big, dripping syringe in her hand, filled with a pale yellow liquid, like puss, and Rey flinches as it’s sunk inside her, deep, deeper.

She’s so full of holes, she might sink.

No, that’s entirely wrong-- she’s untethered again, shooting upwards on the surge of blood in her belly, the rise of the flush in her cheeks. It’s _bliss_.

 

She bites him when she finds him. They’re tangled together again, him slotted into her, and the feeling is so natural, it’s like they were never parted; the cold chrome and white light were only a tiny, artificial interlude in this continuous narrative of their flesh, their honeysuckle fever.

She bites him, incisors in his bicep, because he _needs_ this—she remembers now. To be shown the way, marked, guided through his uncertain proclamations of absolute, unwavering faith. Acolyte, willing, malleable.

He’d pawed uncertainly at her belly when she’d arrived, looked to her with glassed-over eyes that said: _are you sure_? And medical science had said back: _yes_ (though Rey doesn’t know if they’re right, couldn’t tell even if they were). Her womb is empty. They have not conceived. They must try more.

So she bites him, hard, again, right at the corner of his neck and shoulder, and he’s _keening_ with it; they’d both forgotten how much he loves this, and Rey smiles hazily into his pale flesh, relishing the re-discovery. It's incredible, how much he needs for the pain of it. Some type of strange self-flagellation that she aids him in willingly, tooth and nail.

Finally she releases him and pulls away. His eyes are closed, eyelashes dark, lush fans, trembling on his pale cheeks, red lips fallen open. It's the most wanton, needy thing that Rey has ever seen, and she grows impossibly wetter around him, sliding lazily to the root of him. Once, then again, dazed by this new and wonderful power. She notices that his pace has slowed, stopped, hands trembling on her upper arms where he’s holding her, and his breathing is humid, so close that the huff of it is pushing her flyaway hairs into the corners of her mouth. An almost-kiss.

She grins outright; he’s wreckage, just from a _bite_. His presence is scattered, untethered, and desperately in need. Without pause, she tangles her fingers in his dark, sweaty hair, tilts his head back, and latches to that milky throat. She’s devouring him, and their bond sings with it:

How perfect, how _wonderful,_ memory can be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> l o l why am i still writing this


	4. Rey III

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heads up: this chapter isn't sexy. Rey doesn't keep the baby.

On the third day, Rey is ash.

There is nothing left to be taken, no little dregs of hope, or heat, or light to be scraped up from the bottom of her. She’s been cleared out, laying splayed on the table like a plate licked clean, a finger run around the edges to sop her up thoroughly.

She’s pregnant.

She’s pregnant, and the one thing that she couldn’t have prepared herself for was that _she’d_ know, too, as quickly and as certainly as Ren did. He’d crowed about it to her from deep in the bowels of their lust, forearms crowded around her ears, maybe, or his sweat in her eyes, she doesn’t remember how or where; _I’ll know_ , he’d muttered, lip curled, face snarled, _I’ll know exactly the moment when. When—_

But she’d cried out, too, when they’d conceived, because suddenly Rey was _alight_. A different heat, not so slow and svelte as their familiar drugged ache, but some blinding thing that made her head pound with the force of her heartbeat. Her very life-force, doubled, simply far too much for anything so basic and scuddy as a human body to handle. She thought, for a moment, that this was how she was going to die: straight supernova. Bang, the two of them— _no, the three of them, that’s right_ —murdered in a plasma cloud of carbon and hydrogen and ionic dust.

But, somehow, miraculously, the universe had trudged onwards. Her body was pulled right out from on top of his, a wet little slip of a moment, and somewhere in the distance, beyond the brilliance, she could feel his pride. His his his, the best thing that he had ever done, all wrapped up inside her under layers of tissue, her human guts and pieces. Oh, he could feel the magnificence of the thing they’ve made, a strange and prophetic creature begat of the Force and tangled bloodlines, and he worshipped it.

Rey burned on. She felt nothing, neither the agony of lust nor defeat, just—burning. The mother of a new planet, maybe, convecting and churning its molten surface in the quiet, dark confines of her womb.

Sun-bearer, host to a nebula of stars.

 

Rey groans; she doesn’t think that it’s possible for her body to hurt as thoroughly as it does at this moment. Her breathing blisters in her throat, and there’s something impossibly heavy across her chest, hot and completely inescapable. A weight she can’t begin lift. She cracks her eyes open, lifts her head just the barest of degrees; through the trembling blur of her lashes, there’s a vast whiteness that slowly translates into a kind of meaning: someone’s draped a standard-issue blanket across her, probably at some point during her unconsciousness. It’s endearingly tucked in around the edges of her body, and it’s crushing her.

She drops her head back down to the table with a _thunk,_ and her fists tense at the sparks behind her eyes, a flinching instinct, and oh—right. That’s right.

Her hands are bound, swaddled and swollen in soft cloth, and now she remembers what she’d become. How she’d fought back, dirty and low and hard, tried to quench the terrible brightness inside her the only way she knows how: by getting it out, becoming animal.

She flexes her fingers in the mitts. _That’s right_. She’s insane.

Back on Jakku, she’d done things kind of like this. A piece of shrapnel, stuck in her hand, some metal slug burrowed in her bicep; nothing but quick thinking and prying fingers to stave off tetanus, gangrened flesh. But it was something different, more secret and shameful and significant, the one lesson women of her boiling planet had taught her. Spilled from the lips of sunburnt whores, the hard women of the outpost, sand embedded in the leathery folds of their skin: an urgency, above all else, to remove danger, rip it from your body—the only thing you ever truly own.

She remembers, now, how she’d risen, feverish, from the metal examination table, waiting till the hovering nurses had left to enact her crude inkling of a plan. It might’ve been minutes, it might’ve been hours, but Rey was on fire with this being inside her, the ancient and incendiary mantra of _get it out get it_ out, unable to think or feel or know anything beyond that moment.

 

So she’d tried it. This was the kind of thing that it took inhuman strength to do. But she’d do it, as a thousand desperate, derelict women had; somehow, the weight of the galaxy was all winnowed down, pivoting on her success. She scrabbled across the little tray of sterile instruments waiting at her bedside, fingers clumsy and preoccupied, but she had what she needed. A metal probing rod, cruelly hooked, the right kind of tool do the damage necessary. She looked at it; through it, to the blipping readouts and colorful charts banked around the room that that demarcated who she was, her livingness, her breathing.

Her body, spread across the walls. _The only thing she’d ever owned,_ and it had been violated, in the most deep and intimate sense of the word.

Her knuckles whitened around the instrument; she would do this, even if it meant the end of her.

 

There is a very specific method, say the women of Jakku, to destroying yourself from the inside out:

You breathe. You breathe, a _lot_ , deep and hard and fast from your belly, short little choppy things that make all the blood rush to your head. This makes it better (really, it doesn’t, but you’ll forget to breathe entirely in a moment, so you tell yourself that it does).

Then, when it begins to really, _truly_ hurt, a quality of pain that you’ve never known before, you tell yourself that this is better that the alternative. That you have no choice.

When the pain increases again, becomes unbearable, you tell your sister to help you, take your trembling hand in hers and guide you through. If you have no sister, pray. God will do the work.

Only when you can feel the blood between your legs, seeping down through the deepest seams of you, is it done. Then, it’s time to wrap your wounded self in gauze, pray, breathe, continue on. Emptied.

 

Rey only got to the third step; she had no sister to help her, no god to pray to. Only her own trembling hands, brutal metal, the raw and bottomless fear of the creature inside of her, and what would happen to the course of all of fucking _existence_ if she failed--

Ren was there, clawing at her mind, pathetic and desperate and sobbing for her to _STOP PLEASE STOP._ Another unnamed force, cresting overtop of him, cold and dark and enormous as a sea of sand at midnight, freezing her body and stopping her progress. But Rey was okay, though every part of her was shivering. They were too late, and she was victorious; the blood had come!

A lot of blood had come. _Too much blood had come_ , she thought vaguely, before the nurses hands were everywhere and her body was no longer hers, once again. But she was satisfied; she could feel the ember buried in her belly finally, _finally,_ beginning to fade.        

 

And now she’s here, mitted, incapacitated, numbed from the waist down so completely that she doesn’t know what she’d find down there, even if she could peel the blanket back. Pathetic, but triumphant—no burning, no Ren, no nothing, save for the hollow echo of her own heartbeat in the ashes of herself.

Rey beat them, and she’d be content enough to lay here until the end of time. She has no where to go, nowhere to be. She’s destroyed what she was made to carry; she doesn’t suppose that empty vessels have much to do in life, but that’s alright. She is alone, and she is thankful.

The door hisses open. It’s a sound she’s become intensely familiar with—she thinks she can hear it when she’s unconscious, dreaming of people to come and tear her body apart, slip and slide her guts around with their bare hands, stich her up again and call her names of the divine. Maybe she’s still dreaming, here, now.

But the footsteps sound different. Too clipped, too loud.

She opens her eyes again, with monumental effort, and a man is standing at her bedside. She’s never seen him before in her life. He’s a strange looking thing, huge and dark in a charcoal-grey greatcoat, but features scrubbed clean, all pale skin and hair and eyes. One eye’s been blackened, and recently; the sclera is scarlet, skin angry and purple and dark against the rest of his washed-out self.

They stare at each other. She has nothing to say to him, nothing to offer, even if she could work her jaw to speak.

“I thought you’d be bigger,” the man says, finally, though the timbre of his voice is more tender than cruel. He’s saying it for the benefit of his ears alone.

Rey’s tongue feels enormous and sluggish; a pearl of drool rolls from the corner of her lax mouth, and she can’t move to wipe it away. She breathes instead. He moves closer, sits beside her; she hadn’t noticed that there was a chair there before.

He’s so close to her, and what’s left of Rey is crawling with it, but she’s forced to tremble under her sheet, pray that this man wants nothing more of her than to look. A dark, gloved hand reaches towards her face— _oh god, oh mercy, please let me be dreaming_ —but it’s only to curtly wipe away the drool where it’s running down her jawline, cool leather on the heat of her.

“I have some information that pertains to you,” the man says. “I think you’d be keen to know it.”

Rey blinks her acquiescence.

“We lost the baby,” he says, straight, with no hint of sentimentality. For a moment, some ancient part of Rey is caustic, rueful: _No shit_.

“I’ll admit—I’m impressed by your… tenacity. Not many could do what you did.” Rey blinks again; she has nothing to say to this.

He watches her indifference for a moment, before gesturing down the table, waving over her stomach. “You’ll be happy to know that they’ve fixed you, then.”

Rey’s very breath is scalding in her throat.

“A few days rest, then you’ll continue. Do what is expected of you. A fertile tree is able to bear more than just a single fruit, of course, and you’ve so duplicitously denied the Order something it very dearly needs.” He’s not looking at her, his eyes laid somewhere at a fixed point above her crown.

There must be something left of her to destroy, if words can still hurt her as much as this. Her vision starts to shimmer. What must she do, where must she go, to simply stop.

If Rey was a village, she’d burn the last of herself to the ground.

“You’ve destroyed him,” he says, and her eyes jerk to his, spilling the hot wetness down her cheeks with the movement of it. His voice is quiet once again, his gaze finally meeting hers as brushes a hand down his coat, makes to stand. “You’ve fucked with him, in ways you can’t even imagine.”

The texture of reality rankles against her, and _oh_ , how she wishes to not remember.

He reaches down (maybe he’ll kill her, now), grips Rey’s face in one enormous hand. She can’t see, can’t know or smell or taste beyond her bitter-salty tears, the cold of the leather squeezing her cheeks so tight he'll crush her, and it’s alright. She’s just a malleable thing, a body broken down into its base components. _Again, again, again._

Rey can’t see through the tears but, doggedly, beneath it all, she can still hear his voice:

 _Viper_ , the man calls her, and it’s the highest praise with which he could’ve commended her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ahh okay i'm done with this shit.

**Author's Note:**

> What do you do when you have midterms and two other long, unfinished fics to work on? Write a third one! like wtf is this tho  
> Comments/feedback very welcome, as always!


End file.
